A is for A Tail of Six Dinosaurs

Tail - tale - dinosaurs . . . never-mind! Brain sent a bunch of dinosaur shelfies the other day without knowing I had just bought another from the range in Poundland Plus, nor why I had bought it, and it's led to my digging out a few other images for a post which - if nothing else - is instructive of how the toy industry works at the bottom end!

These are they (Mr. Berke's shelfies, that is!); three dollars . . .  is what; one-eighty? Something like that! And for that money you can't complain, nicely blister-packed with backing-cards and a decent level of decoration, my complaint - voiced before now - is the rather obvious joins where separate mouldings are fused-together to give the impression of, or allow for poses which would otherwise have proven difficult or impossible with only undercuts.

By the 'other' LP; Lollipop Toys (or Brooklyn Lollipops Import Corp. as they call themselves!), there are six in the whole line, and you may have recognised one or two of them, as they have popped-up on the Blog in the past.

This is the range in its entirety, the upper shot being from Henbrandt's old catalogue, the lower shot from the back of the Poundland one I bought and Blogged a year or two ago. You can see that both companies were (are?) getting the same colour schemes, which also those carried by Brian's shelfie herd.

But, I'd already bought my 2nd 'Dippy', this time from Poundworld Plus, and now in a different scheme (right) to the [common] previous scheme, as we saw with the Funtastic one on the left; Funtastic being what the industry calls a 'phantom-brand' of Poundland, I tend to call them made-up brands or imagibrands!

The new one is by Toy Bank another phantom-brand . . . of the same group! This time the sub-branding on the box is 'Little Fossil Toys', which has to be added to Green Gecko and Pirate Monkey in the ever spiraling-upward list of cross-referenced 'brandlettes'!

Packaging - clockwise from top left - for Lollipop, Henbrandt and Poundworld Plus, note however, that the counter display carton from Henbrant's catalogue is wearing the logo for Zhong Jie Toys, a company already supplying Poundland (or was it 99p Stores? . . . Aaaaarrrrrhhhhh!) with wild animal models!

Remember my paint-tray-guilt-stupid-Brit-thing purchase the other month? Well, it's from the same range, in the same (older?) scheme; Out of the Blue, probably a contractor rather than a phantom, and while I can't remember the counter display, I bet it was the same as the Henbrandt catalogue shot . . .

. . . and I'll bet there are other contracted and phantom brands out there carrying these six rather good, usually very cheap, foamed-PVC (or similar) dinosaur models, indeed, I think I mentioned TKMaxx having sets of three about two years ago, with different graphical packaging! In fact I thought I'd taken a shelfie, but I can't find it so I may not have!

More dino's - later today.